Fall Series 2024 Early Bird tickets are now available! Prices increase when film & speaker lineup is announced on Oct 16. Stay tuned.
Born in India and looked after by a Tibetan nanny, it was only a matter of time before Ethan Berman (he/him) found his calling in high mountain landscapes. With climbing roots sewn between craggy outcrops in Thailand and granite monoliths in Yosemite, in recent years he has focused on alpinism, which has taken him to the Himalaya, Andes, Saint Elias, and Alaska Range, and kept him busy at home in the Canadian Rockies. Ethan was awarded the 2021 Piolet D’or for his new route on the Emperor Face of Mt. Robson with Uisdean Hawthorn. His writing has been featured in both the American and Canadian Alpine Journal and he maintains a blog of words and images from his favorite adventures at www.ethanclimbs.com. Ethan also connects to the landscapes that inspire him through researching changes to snow and vegetation dynamics using satellite imagery.
This speaker was part of VIMFF 2024 which is now over.
The Waddington Range is comprised of the highest and most technical peaks in BC, including the tallest in the province, Mount Waddington (4,019m). In August 2023, VIMFF Coast Mountain Adventure Grant recipients Ethan Berman, Matteo Agnoloni, and Sebastian Pelletti set out to circumnavigate the nine major peaks of the Range. The circuit of the five Serra Peaks, Tiedemann, Asperity, Combatant, and Waddington, had been traversed before, but never as a complete loop, nor in the reverse direction.
As often is the case in the mountains, the trip didn’t exactly go as planned. Unsettled weather and snow-covered rock challenged the climbers, who managed to make the first traverse of the five Serra peaks from East to West over four days before cutting the loop short and circling back to the Plummer Hut. They opened up unclimbed terrain that had baffled decades of climbers, leading to multiple first ascents in less-than-ideal conditions. They also witnessed the rapid changes taking place in the range, observing that many of the snow, ice and glacier routes in the guidebook are becoming inaccessible and descent options are deteriorating. Ethan and Matteo will also speak to the intensity of returning to the location of their accident in 2022, where they experienced an extremely close call when Matteo was struck in the leg by rockfall while rappelling into the guts of the Serra Spires.
